escalift: wouldn't it be funny if twins could get divorced, and there was a TV show called "twin divorce court"?kidicarus222: wouldn't be funnier if it was "twin death match?"kidicarus222: and then "siamese twin death match"kidicarus222: and then "thai siamese twin death match"escalift: give me a second to catch up...escalift: i'm working on the incest angleescalift: "who wants to marry their twin?"kidicarus222: hahahahakidicarus222: would that necessitate gay incest?escalift: in many cases, i'm surekidicarus222: and also gay marriage?escalift: yes, i suppose soescalift: but fraternal twins of opposite sexes are also legitimate twins, recallkidicarus222: that's the worst kind of twinescalift: i know, i'd hate to be the kind of twin where you had to explain you were a twinkidicarus222: my dad's that kindkidicarus222: although they look identicalescalift: god, put him out of his miserykidicarus222: i was supposed to be twinskidicarus222: my mom was hugekidicarus222: but i was just onekidicarus222: although i'm a gemini, so i guess it worked outescalift: oh. i thought you were going to say the other one diedkidicarus222: yeskidicarus222: i killed himkidicarus222: in the wombkidicarus222: the nosy fuckescalift: wrapped that umbilical cord right around his neckkidicarus222: no, i ate all his placentaescalift: but somehow you must have removed his head, too, because when you were born i wanted you to push out his severed head first and then pop out and say surpriseescalift: and then i want the rest of him to still be in therekidicarus222: but i didn't do that

So I have a dream in which I had this weird epiphany: the force we call creativity is the ability certain people have to see parallel dimension, some of which are pretty abstract and resemble ours in no apparent way, and some of which are much like ours with silght variations. When people create anything, they're merely recycling what they see when their minds drift into other dimensions.

Tuesday, March 25, 2003

Sound plays a great deal more into video games than a lot of people realize, I think. Unlike the cinematic score in movies — music that punctuates the mood and tells the viewer how to feel — the music in video games is usually inconsequential to gameplay. That is, it just loops with the same melody onward to infinity, providing of course your character stays in the same area and there's no time limit. In spite of — or because of — this tendency, you hear the same music over and over again. I’d wager just about anybody kid under 25 and over 15 could hum the original Super Mario Bros. tune in an instance if you asked them to. But while the music and memory of it is just kind of a by-product of playing video games, the sound effects are very crucial, necessitating the player’s memorization and instant recognition of a whole vocabulary of sound effects to succeed in the game.

For instance, going back to Super Mario Bros., every noise has a distinct meaning: one for when Mario snags a coin, one for when he slides down a pipe, and one for when a Koopa shell ricochets off something, whether that be Mario’s foot or a wall or a warp pipe or whatever. Thus, in order to do well, the player would have to hear the noise of a recently-kicked shell bouncing off an upcoming obstacle and then prepare to have Mario jump over it as it comes sliding back. Or take a hit. Whatever.

And Super Mario Bros. is just a simple game, too. Newer games that have for complex sonic capabilities have hundreds of sound effects that people still learn to translate instantly. Funny that.

Sunday, March 23, 2003

I finally got the pictures from my "Creature from the San Andreas Fault" packet on my computer. These accompanied some text I put together for the final project in Dr. Loftus' Writing 109VA class: "mix text and image and make it not suck." That may or may not have been the assignment per se, but that was the basic idea, for sure. What appears below depict scenes from the fictional low-budget slasher movie, "Creature from the San Andreas Fault."

Here's Kristen as Vivian Lynn Pfefferman, the actress playing the film's main, Patsy Pickett, as she's being stalked in the backyard by Nate, as the Creature.

Patsy's chesty and newly dead best friend Ginny, as played by Jill.

Me, as the director Simon Diamond, trying to teach Kristen to scream.

.

Kristen doing her best Marion Crane. Also, Kristen holding her chest in such a way so as to make her boobs appear smashed.

Patsy's impending death by chopping.

You wouldn't think you'd try to avoid an axe-wielding maniac by climbing a tree, but nonetheless...

I was so happy the way Brent, who took all these pictures, totally got this to look like the scene from Scream with Neve Campbell and Rose MacGowan. Fucking awesome.

So I guess I got all the vacation I'm gonna get this break. Edith took me to the Getty yesterday, which was seriously cool. In all honesty, I think the awesomeness of the architecture overshadowed the art, which was more dated that I usually like seeing, but there was still a lot of cool stuff. They've got this exhibit of Lee Miller's photography and some of her modeling, too. She kicks ridiculous amounts of ass. Aside from that, the rest of the day was also cooler than I'm used to.

The perfect capper? A rerun of the Christopher Walken-hosted "Saturday Night Live."

"Hmm.. I don't know why people make such a big fuss over Colonel Angus!""I myself never much cared for Colonel Angus! He rubs me the wrong way. I'm not sure why... Can't put my finger on it...""Break out some fresh linens, Bedelia! We're gonna have Colonel Angus here tonight!""Colonel Angus? I don't know nothin' about no Colonel Angus!""Well, get ready, Bedelia. If I remember correctly, Colonel Angus can be very messy!"

And now to work on the task at hand: what to do to the girls' rooms now that they're gone all week.

Friday, March 21, 2003

That last post made me entirely depressed, so I'm going to post some of the best parts of my project for Loftus' class. I had to combine images and text in an interesting way, so I decided to do a press packet for a fictional movie called "Creature from the San Andreas Fault." The pictures are the funniest part, but the writing, which I aimed to make a D-grade straight-to-video movie sound desperately salvageable, had some funny parts, too.

On why "Creature" is straight-to-video:

“In fact, Sunrise Studios is so excited to present 'Creature from the San Andreas Fault' to audiences that the film is skipping a release in cold, impersonal theaters and going straight to the VCRs in the home of every movie fan in America.”

On on-set murders:

“Things took an unexpected turn on June 4, 2002, when the body of the film’s star, Vivian Pfefferman, was found in her trailer, fatally bludgeoned with her hairdryer… By mid-August, the Vancouver police Department allowed director Simon Diamond to resume filming although now with the considerable task of rewriting the last third of the movie. The revised script had Pfefferman’s character taking an unexpected trip to her Aunt Martha’s in Maine, never to be seen again.”

“Perkins had to work twice as hard to shine as brightly as her costars, but any actress known for endorsing a popular brand of herpes suppressants knows how to tackle a difficult role… Because her dual roles were the result of the constant script rewrites throughout the film, Perkins did not realize she’d be playing both snobby head cheerleader Laura as well as Louise, her mentally retarded twin sister who expressed herself though dancing.”

On Peach LaGrange, former sitcom mom:

"LaGrange is presently appearing in the off-Broadway play Frottage, which was written by her companion Eve Vanderhorn."

So I finally finished. It almost killed me, but I'm done with all the work I could ever do this quarter. I finished my film packet, I wrote a kickass paper of the work of Sidney Lumet for Dr. Behrens and a separate but equally good one for Dr. Loftus on "Rosemary's Baby." I wrote a good revision of the paper on Louise Erdrich and Ray A. Young Bear. I took all the right tests. And I finished the letter of recommendation for Prof. Waid.

No more class, no more newspaper. Nothing. Nada. Zilch.

Too bad I don't really feel like celebrating, because my nation is bombing the shit out of another nation. And it’s not even just because I don’t support the war — which I don’t — but that the mass bombing of any nation is a pathetic breakdown in the system of communication that helps differentiate humans from animals. War is a tragic inevitability with humans, I guess, but I can’t condone bloodshed. We really fucked up on this one. Everybody. The U.S., the U.N. Iraq, hell, even France couldn’t put their fucking opinions to any use.

It’s bad now, and I’d hate to think of what kind of retributions we might face as it gets worse.

Thursday, March 20, 2003

Feeling to sick to leave the couch and, consequently, watching "She's All That" on cable for no defensible reason, I was struck by the sheer amount of actors and actresses in it who previously starred in works penned by Kevin Williamson, the guy who wrote "Scream."

Freddie Prinze Jr. was previously in "I Know What You Did Last Summer," the screenplay of which Williamson wrote. Rachel Leigh Cook previously appeared on "Dawson's Creek," which Williamson created, even if he may not have written the episodes her character appeared in. Matthew Lillard appeared in "Scream." Jodi Lyn O'Keefe appeared in "Halloween H20," or however you're supposed to represented the "twenty years after" sequel to "Halloween," which Williamson wrote. Usher and Clea DuVall both appeared in "The Faculty," which Williams also wrote. And that's ignoring the non-speaking cameo by Sarah Michelle Gellar, who appeared alongside Prinze in "I Know What You Did Last Summer."

Either this speaks to incestuous casting practices in mid-nineties teen entertainment or that Williamson — who's really not doing much of anything notable these days — had his had in a lot of successful, generative projects at the time.

Tuesday, March 18, 2003

Still movie-addled for so many reasons. While I'm on the subject: a thought on "Donnie Darko," which I just recently watched again and which has enough loose ends to keep my head busy. I have a small theory. Really, it's nothing, but it's a fun way to look at the movie.

I think Cherita Chen could be important, more so than a casual viewer might think.

In short, Cherita seems like a fairly minor character, but she happens to be present for a lot of key moments throughout the film. Sometimes she has lines, sometimes she's in the background, being all sad and dumpy. In one of the more interesting scenes — and one of the ones where she actually gets to do something — she drops the book that has the title character's name written on it. And though that might seem like the kind of thing a high school girl might do when she's suffering from the terrors of an unrequited crush, I can't help myself from wondering if it represents something more. Think about it: Cherita's shining moment is the odd abstract dance routine she performs late in the movie. It's bizarre. No one gets it. But it's creative in a way that a thoughtful first-time viewer might not have thought Cherita would have been capable of.

My theory is that the book Cherita drops isn't just a stupid book: It's the movie itself, the movie "Donnie Darko." She's this strange, creative type who happens to be around to witness bits of a story here and there. She doesn't understand what she saw — or, especially, what caused Donnie to die — but she took the pieces she knew and used them as the foundation upon which she built a creative, bizarre story that not a lot of people initially got. I mean, what better way to describe the movie, right?

Like I said, it's actually nothing, but it's nonetheless an interesting way to make Cherita Chen feel better about themselves.

Sunday, March 16, 2003

Auto response from jessicaiscool143: the other day i saw a boy wearing a hat that said "kids need hugs not drugs" and i thought that that was not very nice cause some kids do need drugs, like the ones that are all hyperactive and can't sit still... or the ones that have something wrong and need to take some drug to cure them and i thought, "what a mean and discriminating person who wears that hat!"

Also, I finished the "Rosemary's Baby" paper, which is now titled: “Helicopter or Hell-icopter: Pairing Technological Devices with Satanic Plots in Rosemary’s Baby.”

Saturday, March 15, 2003

So Roommate Jill and I have this little game where I throw something at her. Nothing big, just little wads of foil and coasters and things like that. Anyway, the game is that she asks me to stop and I don't. I think it's fun. So does she, deep down. But the game took a wonderful new turn this evening. In an attempt to avoid being struck by another wadded up ball of foil, she tried hiding in the shower. Boy, was that a mistake.

I turned the shower on and got her pretty wet and then I doused her with shaving cream. The roommates loved it. Meghan even got pictures.

Kind of like the shower scene from "Psycho," only with splattered shaving cream. She said her eyes stung, but you know how Jill is.

Friday, March 14, 2003

miglorious: i thought sweden was in western europekidicarus222: it kind of is. like, northwesternmiglorious: well no because isn't it really near russia?kidicarus222: russia is eastern europemiglorious: rightmiglorious: funnymiglorious: i may or may not have known thatkidicarus222: you're not global studies, are you?miglorious: apparently nomiglorious: i never learned geography in any class everkidicarus222: you should have had mrs. jordan for seventh grademiglorious: i know i totally wanted herkidicarus222: she was big and fat and i think a lesbian, but she taught us about geography, medieval times, and hot air balloons. and that is all. she didn't know how to do algebra, so she kind of fucked us all over in that respectkidicarus222: what a bitch, eh?kidicarus222: but we had a renaissance fairkidicarus222: i was the kingmiglorious: in seventh grade you had one teacher for geography and math?kidicarus222: yes, i went to catholic schoolmiglorious: baby schoolkidicarus222: at least i know about jebusmiglorious: but Fiona isn't the armmiglorious: I prefer to see the amoebae as friends surrounding me in a time of need, like a bridge over troubled watermiglorious: [excerpts from my paper]

Wednesday, March 12, 2003

So I reviewed this movie for the Santa Barbara Film Festival edition of Artsweek. It's called "Charlotte Sometimes." I probably wouldn't have gone if the director, a genuine-seeming guy named Eric Byler, didn't talk to me as I was picking up my press pass. But he seemed pretty cool so I went to see it and I really liked it. Anyway, after the screening he gives me his email address and I ended up quoting him in my article.

Anyway, Byler gives me another email:

Drew, I'm 100 percent not shitting you when I say this is one of the most insightful pieces ever written about the film. You're right up there with Ebert, and can't think of which other one to include in your category. I'm sure you'll go far as a journalist. I'm very impressed. I would love to add this URL to our website. Will it be staying up for long?

How fucking cool is that? Me and Ebert. Here's the movie website, too.